2 Politics, Embodiment, Everyday Life

Lefebvre and Spatial Organization

Timon Beyes

Introduction

In 1986, Henri Lefebvre and the French architects Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud submitted a proposal for the International Competition for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement, held by the City of Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia. The call had asked for designs to improve ‘the unfinished plan of the central zone and the enlargement of the modern city’ (Blagojevic´, 2009: 120). The proposal, however, began by rejecting the assumptions of definitive design and detailed planning. ‘We can only rejoice’, Lefebvre and the architects stated, ‘that Novi Beograd is unfinished’ (Renaudie et al., 2009: 6). To continue the ‘neo-rationalist’ types of organizing the city and its zoning would fail; ‘the resistance of the population … expresses an important loss of the “organizational message”’ (p. 8). To adopt an eclectic ‘post-modern historicism’ would not work either, provoking merely endless disagreement on the epoch and styles best adaptable to the present. ‘As with every dynamic organization’, the authors wrote, ‘cities are fluid and mobile and any attempt to stop them in order to analyse and represent them risks killing them’ (p. 11).

Eschewing propositions of fixed urban forms in favour of open and radical ‘modes of organization’ (p. 31), which were predicated on the ideas of the ‘right to the city’ and self-organization (autogestion), the proposal was eliminated in the first round of the jury procedure. Found in the civic archives of Belgrade by the architectural historian Ljiljana Blagojevic´ and published alongside contextual essays by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber (2009), the text presents an intriguing point of departure for rethinking “Lefebvre and Organization Studies” in at least three ways. For one, ‘Lefebvre’s theoretical sensibility pervades the text’ (Smith, 2009: 81). The document therefore points to conceptual, programmatic and political implications of enlisting this thinker’s writings. These implications echo yet go beyond The Production of Space, Lefebvre’s great book of spatial theory that seems to dominate (not only) his organization-theoretical reception. Second, what is striking about the proposal is not only the engagement with nitty-gritty aspects of urban design, as Smith notes, but also its adoption of a language and understanding of organization as a processual and contested spatial phenomenon. I know of no other text by Lefebvre that departs from the notion of autogestion in order to explicitly thematize the question of spatial organization, with the city as form, medium and outcome of processes of social organization. Third, the proposal’s focus on the complexity and the potentiality of the urban everyday presents the organization of the social as a messy and embodied realm of encounters, struggle and possibility, which entails the bodies of architects and scholars. Research here is ‘a creative, sensual practice’ (Kipfer et al., 2008b: 300) that helps produce space, too.

Guided by these observations, the chapter argues for a more wide-ranging and deeper engagement with Lefebvre’s oeuvre in the study of organization, one that is informed by his wider concerns and his politics. Such an engagement should not be limited to his work on space in general and The Production of Space in particular. Yet I seek to dwell here on the important thematic of the spatial constitution of organization or, in Lefebvre’s words, ‘the problems of spatial organization’ (2009b: 186). I believe this is important because a reading of Lefebvre’s body of work that is both closer and broader can help to further develop the study of organizational space, or rather, the study of spaces of organizing. Another way of putting this is to state that there is a need to be aware of, and withstand, a two-fold risk of closure in the organization-theoretical reception of Lefebvre’s writings: first, to focus only on The Production of Space and, second, to be content with this book’s often-quoted and seemingly accessible triad model of conceived, perceived and lived space as laid out in its introductory section (1991: 33).

Withstanding this kind of closure does not mean aiming for a definite account or a finalization of Lefebvre’s ideas. Given this thinker’s far ranging and evolving engagements with different themes and contexts as well as the sprawling and sometimes contradictory style of his writing, any interpretation of his work, it could be suggested, is necessarily partial.¹ As Merrifield (1995: 295) argued, it seems sensible to interpret Lefebvre’s ‘tantalizing vague … loose, episodic and frequently prolix’ style of writing as an indication of the writer’s intention to keep his systems of thoughts open. And of course, my own approach to Lefebvre’s body of work is not disinterested and impartial. It is coloured by prior attempts at working with what could be called a process-theoretical reading of mainly The Production of Space (Beyes and Michels, 2011, 2014), Rhythmanalysis (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012) and Lefebvre’s writings on the urban (Beyes, 2006, 2012).

To begin with, I discuss the problematic of enlisting Lefebvre within organization studies in the form of relying on (the introductory section of) The Production of Space. Reading into Lefebvre’s oeuvre, I then suggest dialectical materialism and its politics as the overall logic of how to conceptualize the production of space; everyday life as the loci where the production of space plays out; and the human body as a crucial component of what researchers seek out in order to trace processes of spatial production. As the terms of how, where and what indicate, this text moves towards what can be called a “hermeneutics of spacing”: an epistemological approach to the politics of spatial organization. In conclusion, I discuss the notion of the right to the city, which frames the proposal for the architectural competition (Renaudie et al., 2009: 1–2), as an exemplary opening for future inquiries into spaces of organizing.

Enlisting Lefebvre

When browsing through the social-scientific, Anglo-American academic literature on ‘space’, one soon encounters references to the French philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre. More often than not, enlisting Lefebvre means elaborating upon, quoting from or gesturing at the 1991 English translation of his 1974 treatise on The Production of Space. The book has been praised as ‘arguably the most important book ever written about the social and historical significance of human spatiality and the particular powers of the spatial imagination’ (Soja, 1996: 8). Its translation into English has been hailed as ‘the event within critical human geography during the 1990s’ (Merrifield, 2006: 103, orig. emphasis). Its conceptualization of space ‘encompasses a great deal of what, 25 years later, has become stock-in-trade in the social sciences’ (Löw, 2008: 29).

For organizational researchers who embark on establishing space as a sui generis realm of critical enquiries, Lefebvre’s treatise has been a major source of inspiration, with the consequence that a Lefebvre-inspired “spatial turn” has broached its convincing appearance in organizational studies (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Taylor and Spicer, 2007). What makes Lefebvre particularly interesting for this context, in a nutshell, is his social ontology of space: ‘social relations … have no real existence save in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 404, orig. emphasis). Lefebvre refused to see space as a universal category that would precede praxis, be it a container having its own material reality independent of human beings or a Kantian transcendental structure for subjective perceptions. Going beyond the abstract duality of subject and object, Lefebvre insisted that space is ‘something more than the theatre, the disinterested stage or setting, of action’ (1991: 410); rather, ‘itself the outcome of past actions … space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others’ (1991: 73). This ontological stance establishes organizational space as a new ‘lens’ (Hernes, 2004) through which organizational life and its very material struggles around power and identity can be understood and analysed (e.g. Beyes and Michels, 2011; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Dale, 2005; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011, 2015; Zhang, Spicer, and Hancock, 2008; Zhang and Spicer, 2014).

At once produced and producing, both consequence and generative force of social relations, space needs to be thought and explored in its processual becoming and production. In the often-quoted Plan of the Present Work, the introduction to The Production of Space, Lefebvre developed a threefold heuristic model to grasp the making of space (1991: 33). First, ‘perceived space’ denotes the routine, embodied and non-reflexive structuring of everyday reality through space-related practices. Second, such spatial practice is permeated with and informed by ‘conceived space’, which refers to society’s dominant conceptual and cognitive, thus ideological ‘representations of space’ enacted by scientists, planners and technocrats. Third, ‘lived space’ designates space users’ non-specialist and expressive spatial experiences: the symbolic that ‘loads’ objects with images, emotions, affects and connotations (Schmid, 2005: 236). In organizational spatial studies this triad model has been heavily cited and received, sometimes as if it would epitomize Lefebvre’s spatial thought. Here, empirical efforts tend to depart from given organizational spaces (usually in formal and thus spatially demarcated organizations) and to trace episodes of the spatial realities of such organizations as either perceived, conceived or lived spaces, as they appear in, for instance, state bureaucracies (Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011, 2015), universities (Beyes and Michels, 2011; Dobers and Strannegård, 2004; Tyler and Cohen, 2010) and theatre companies (Watkins, 2005).

In these studies, the focus tends to fall either on the “cold calculation” of the conceived, managerial space in colonizing and determining the organizational everyday or on a more romantic focus on the appearance of subversive ‘lived’ spaces. In fact, Lefebvre’s own definitions of ‘conceived space’ as the ‘dominant’ space of designers and ‘lived space’ as ‘space of “inhabitants” and “users”’ (1991: 38–39) seem to imply stable, dichotomized camps. Correspondingly, studies on organizational space tend to resort to ‘conceived’ and ‘lived’ spaces as representing, to a greater or lesser degree, separate realms of power and resistance (Dale and Burrell, 2008; Ford and Harding, 2004; Zhang, Spicer, and Hancock, 2008; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011). A reading of Lefebvre that is more attuned to social space’s processual, non a priori nature would caution against such classifications of organizational spaces. Indeed, ‘the knowledge sought here [does] not construct models, typologies or prototypes of spaces; rather it offers an exposition of the production of space’, Lefebvre claimed in the final pages of his book, which ends thus: ‘we are concerned with nothing that even remotely resembles a system’ (1991: 404, 423; orig. emphasis).

Yet employing The Production of Space should only be the beginning. Lefebvre’s prolific writing career spans the major part of the 20th century (Merrifield, 2000), and he had published an impressive array of texts on a variety of topics before he came to write The Production of Space, his 57th book, discounting edited volumes and re-issues. It is necessary to understand Lefebvre’s spatial theories within the context of his lifelong trajectory of thinking (Brenner, 2001), not only because the book is sometimes regarded as a kind of synthesis of Lefebvre’s broader intellectual engagements (Soja, 1996), but also because it contains ambiguities and even contradictions that, when such contextualization is absent, gives forth to what some scholars have criticized as ‘a classic case of mis-recognition’ (Aronowitz, 2001: 133; Kipfer et al., 2008a). As Elden (2001: 820) pointed out, the early, spatially minded Anglo-American discussion of Lefebvre’s writings ‘has come at the cost of neglect of the political and philosophical aspects of his work’.² In this sense, scholars face two critical issues when enlisting Lefebvre (Brenner, 2001: 755): Is their reception accompanied by a reflection on the breadth and details of his work as well as a sensitivity to the political and historical context and aims of his writing? And are intellectual and political impulses as well as contextually embedded ideas turned into a productive reappropriation?

I believe that in order to enable a both more in-depth and wide-ranging engagement with Lefebvre’s work, the study of organization needs to face up to these questions, embrace the political and philosophical aspects and contexts of his wider oeuvre and experiment with productive reappropriations of its ideas and impulses for, and in, the study of organization. In this sense, Dale and Burrell’s (2008) book-length engagement with The Production of Space is an exemplary case, both by reframing the ‘spatial triad’ as the interplay of emplacement, enchantment and enactment—so as to understand the materialization of power in organizational space and its effects—and with regard to the book’s concern with the wider political economy of space.³ In the following pages, I engage with important works written by the philosopher and sociologist before and after The Production of Space. On this basis, I outline three major and in themselves interrelated themes that preoccupied him, namely dialectical materialism, everyday life and the body—concepts that in a dialectical fashion can never be abstracted from their concrete shapes and sites of struggle.

Thinking the Production of Space: Dialectical Materialism and its Politics

The proposal by Renaudie, Guilbaud and Lefebvre clearly pursued a Lefebvrian politics, most notably in its radical suggestions for enabling self-organization and the right to the city. In Gottdiener’s somewhat hyperbolic terms, Lefebvre ‘was perhaps the greatest Marxian thinker since Marx’ (1993: 129). An unwavering Marxist, Lefebvre was committed to an idiosyncratic Hegelian version of historical materialism. Already in Dialectical Materialism, published in 1940, he stressed the need to both take dialectical materialism seriously and preserve its truth by transcending it (Lefebvre, 1968). He credited Hegel with insisting ‘on the fact that all thought and all philosophy, even when it opts for one of the opposed terms by striving to reduce the other, moves amongst contradictions’. Thus, ‘Hegel discovered the Third Term … it is produced rigorously whenever two terms are in contradiction’ (p. 31).

However, Hegel had integrated his ‘discovery’ into an absolute system of thought. It was Marx, then, who denied the Hegelian road towards the perfect philosophical-political system and who paved the way for ‘true materialism’: the latter ‘determines the practical relations inherent in every organized human existence and studies them inasmuch as they are concrete conditions of existence for cultures or ways of life’ (Lefebvre, 1968: 85; emphasis added). Instead of sticking to a priori constructs, instead of glorifying the concept, the real (or, in a spatial vocabulary, ‘concrete space’) is determining dialectical thought (p. 86 ff.). To wit, this was a reading of Marx wrestled from and turned back against the economistic thought of ‘orthodox’ Marxism: ‘economic relations are not the only relations but the simplest ones… . Dialectical materialism is not an economicism’ (p. 85). In writings preceding and foreshadowing The Production of Space, for instance, Lefebvre (1996, 2003c) discussed the city and urban struggles as the key sites (and the key stakes) of the organization and unfolding of the dialectics of practical relations of production—a sentiment that informs the architectural proposal for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement.

Apparently, it was Nietzsche’s influence that made Lefebvre recall the linear version of historical progress as outlined by dialectical materialism. In Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche (Lefebvre, 2003a: 42 ff.), he claimed that the modern world would be not only Hegelian and Marxist, but also Nietzschean: Nietzsche asserted life and the lived against political and economic processes, resistance through poetry, music and theatre as well as hope for ‘the extraordinary: the surreal, the supernatural, the superhuman’ (see also Lefebvre, 1991: 135 ff.; Elden, 2004b: 73 ff.). In a typical move, Lefebvre insisted on a dialectical third term: ‘There are always Three. There is always the Other’ (Lefebvre, 2003b: 50). As this quote indicates, he conceptualized the three terms of dialectics as simultaneously affecting each other, instead of seeing the third term as the result or the solution of the first two. Dialectics thus becomes a processual, fluid dynamic, ‘the inability of the whole … to suppress diversity and difference’ (Allen and Pryke, 1994: 454, fn 3). There is no synthesis in the Hegelian sense. This move resembled an opening towards a non-teleological dialectic that seems to have ‘fuelled’ Lefebvre’s thinking over the course of a century—as Schmid (2005: 307) remarked, this dialectic is the epistemological key to Lefebvre’s whole oeuvre.

With regard to the question of spatial organization, three things follow. First, one can discern an overall pattern for conceptualizing the spatial triad, a dialectical—or trialectical—lesson of how to approach the analysis of space: each term of the spatial triad is to be seen as simultaneously affecting and be affected by the others; none of them can be thought of without recourse to the other two. In a dynamic process, all three terms of Lefebvre’s spatial dialectics constantly mingle (Merrifield, 2000). It follows that spatio-organizational analysis should focus on the process of the production of space through the coming-together of the perceived, the conceived and the lived. To emphasize the processual character of such spatial dialectics is by default closer to an open notion of “spaces of organizing” (that can appear anywhere) than to the comparably bounded point of departure that “organizational spaces” seem to allude to. Such an approach can therefore be aligned with the more radical branch of the process theory of organization that prefers to study organization, or rather organizing, as continuous movement between order and disorder (Cooper, 1986; Holt et al., 2014).

Second, this epistemological key implies an outspoken political stance. It is an emancipatory endeavour which hinges on the critique of power-in-space, as Dale and Burrell (2008) stress. Yet beyond such critique, the point of Lefebvre’s idiosyncratic notion of dialectics is precisely that contradictory spatial constellations already contain and constitute emancipatory traces and moments—as his life-long work on the problematic of everyday life, which I turn to below, succinctly demonstrated. A depoliticized reception of The Production of Space as “merely” a supplier of a spatial heuristics through which to analyse and categorize organizational spaces thus constitutes a rather partial, if not crippling reading of Lefebvre. At the very least, the implications of subtracting critique, politics and emancipation from his work would need to be acknowledged and reflected upon.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there is an irony in translating a Lefebvrian spatial sensibility into the study of formal, bounded organizations: Such organizations are of course already “conceived abstractions” (their concrete spaces produced through the constant mingling of the conceived, perceived and the lived). In what Lefebvre in his time called ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ (Lefebvre, 1994: 68), corporations and state administrations are co-constitutive of the abstract space of capitalism. It was especially the ‘urban organization’ through a kind of bureaucratic capitalist governmentality ‘against which Lefebvre endlessly railed’, and ‘which is a far cry from the organization of an anti-capitalist politics’ (Harvey, 2013: 140). With Lefebvre, in other words, the presupposition of formal organizations as given objects of inquiry is far from self-evident. As echoed in the proposal for the urban design competition, the question of organization, on the one hand, takes the form of autogestion—literally, self-management or self-governance.⁴ It denotes the radical redistribution of power towards processes of self-organization, towards social groups creating and governing the conditions of their practice. It is again not a fixed condition, form or model, but an emancipatory process of struggle over the democratic control of firms, enterprises, universities and political associations, but also areas, neighbourhoods or regions (Lefebvre, 2009d). On the other hand, and relatedly, the city is the form and medium of organization. Lefebvre argued that the issue of autogestion would be increasingly enacted through the organization and appropriation of urban space. In this sense, a Lefebvre-inspired study of organization would approach urban constellations as sites of organizing and struggle, allowing for both new and temporary forms and practices of organization and their politics, especially in relation to practices of self-organization and everyday appropriations of urban spaces (Beyes, 2010, 2012, 2015).

Situating the Production of Space: Everyday Life

According to Renaudie, Guilbaud and Lefebvre’s architectural proposal (2009: 1), the organizational site and medium of the city needed to become a ‘space of reappropriation (of daily life, of the social)’. Even in ‘strict urban organizations’, transgressions invariably take place, ‘an overflowing of established frames, proving that everywhere there is an “undefined” that refuses to give itself to instituted paths’ (p. 11). This ‘undefined’ and its potential echoes the romantic notion of the irreducible remainder: There is something that does not add up, that is left over ‘after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis’ (Lefebvre, 2008a: 97), as Lefebvre put it in his most renowned definition of everyday life in the first of his Critiques of Everyday Life.

If dialectical materialism and its politics are the key to understanding Lefebvre’s overall approach, then the critique of everyday life constitutes the heart of his career-spanning critical project ‘to decode the modern world, the bloody riddle, according to the everyday’ (Lefebvre and Levich, 1987: 9). This project encompassed the three volumes of Critique of Everyday Life (2008a, 2008b, 2008c), first published in 1947, 1961 and 1981, respectively, the 1968 monograph on Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), and the posthumously published sketch on Rhythmanalysis (2004), which presented itself as an approach to explore the various rhythms of daily life. Yet also the notion of space as developed in The Production of Space and in the books on the urban that preceded it (Lefebvre, 1996, 2003c) ‘can be understood as a kind of recoding of his initial concept of everyday life’ (Ross, 2008: 9). According to Stanek (2011), rather than merely derived from long-held philosophical positions, Lefebvre’s theory of space grew out of his concrete engagement with, and on-the-ground research on, urban and rural development and planning in postwar France.

The question of everyday life was of utmost importance to Lefebvre, surpassing the workplace as the primary site of domination and struggle, enlarging questions of social transformation to more socio-cultural and urban (and more than “simply” economistic) processes—for example to ‘sustenance, clothing, furnishing, homes, neighbourhoods, environment’ (Lefebvre, 1994: 21). As Roberts (1999: 19) pointed out, Lefebvre pioneered a new kind of Marxist sociology, a critical hermeneutics of the everyday that would focus on the contradictory relations of living subjects and concrete objects instead of merely constituting a philosophical claim of concreteness. The idea that the complexities of the everyday are in and by themselves utterly remarkable had of course already been vividly demonstrated by the Weimar critics Benjamin and Krakauer, as well as by the Surrealists, and was later picked up by the Situationists as well as Debord, Barthes and de Certeau, to name just some of the obvious artists and thinkers (Highmore, 2002)—Lefebvre himself was personally involved with both the Surrealists and the Situationist International (Merrifield, 2006).

However, ‘Lefebvre is the first writer actually to codify the “everyday” as phenomenologically co-present with, but conceptually distinct from, mere “everydayness”’, the latter signifying ‘the modality of capital’s administration of atomization and repetition’ (Roberts, 1999: 23). In a counter-move to the Heideggerian notion of everydayness as a realm of alienation, then, Lefebvre’s version of everyday life is a contradictory, potentially conflict-ridden constellation (Elden, 2004a). Everyday life continually produces irreducible remainders that bear traces of dissent, resistance and subversion, of transformation and critique. In his later life Lefebvre seemed to have become progressively embittered about the colonization of the quotidian and the dwindling possibilities of resistance, but he never gave up on his main intuition.⁵ As he wrote in his late third volume of the Critique of Everyday Life (2008c: 10): ‘with daily life, lived experience is taken up and raised up to critical thinking. It is no longer disdained, regarded as an insignificant residue’.

For Lefebvre, then, ‘everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts’ (Lefebvre, 2008a: 97; orig. emphasis): ‘the everyday is therefore the most universal and the most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the best hidden’ (Lefebvre and Levich, 1987: 9). These ideas informed, and resurfaced in, his work on space. Thus, in The Production of Space, social space was described as ‘at once homogeneous and divided, at once unified and fragmented’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 306). In the second volume of the Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre would, in move that foreshadows the later spatial triad, define everyday life as encompassing the three levels of necessity, appropriation and social control (Lefebvre, 2008b).⁶

Reading The Production of Space and the spatial triad in the context of Lefebvre’s life-long concern with the problematic of everyday life has important implications for the study of organizational space. The production of space is invariably situated in the mundane contradictions of quotidian encounters. If dialectical materialism supplies the overall pattern of how to conceptualize and interpret space, then this where of everyday life harbours the fundamental methodological principle for empirical spatial inquiries. Merrifield (2006: 4) described Lefebvre’s approach as ‘a sort of participant observation’ of the everyday: It is here that the conceived manifests itself, the perceived is routinely reproduced, and the lived makes expressive and symbolic use of organizational objects—and it is here that spaces of organizing are produced through the coming-together of these processes. Treating everyday organizational space ‘as a repository of larger processes’ (Kipfer et al., 2008a: 8) risks silencing the inventiveness of the everyday and thus the dialectical complexities of, and the spatial contradictions inherent in, space production. To put it simply: ‘If everyday life is going to challenge us into new ways of thinking and new ways of perceiving, then it will need to practise a kind of heuristic approach to social life that does not start out with predesignated outcomes’ (Highmore, 2002: 3). In this sense, one is to study the processes of the production of space that shape the urban everyday more than the products of spatial production; to research quotidian spaces of organizing more than the spatial set-ups of formal organizations. As discussed in the following section, such mundane making of space is invariably tied to human corporeality.

Exploring the Production of Space: The Body

If ‘Lefebvre’s most urgent goal is to recapture genuine experience and free the concrete from its subsumption under the abstract’ (Aronowitz, 2001: 154), then it should not come as a surprise that he was keenly attuned to conceptions of the body, and that the latter became a(nother) critical and recurrent figure of his thought (Elden, 2004c). ‘As such, the living body has (in general) always been present: a constant reference’, Lefebvre remarked in the conclusion to Rhythmanalysis (2004: 67), the last book he wrote and the text that most forcefully made the case for ‘[t]he body. Our body. So neglected in philosophy that it ends up speaking its mind and kicking up a fuss’ (p. 20). Never shy of provocative assertions, in The Production of Space he claimed that ‘[w]estern philosophy has betrayed the body; it has actively participated in the great process of metaphorization that has abandoned the body; and it has denied the body’ (1991: 407; orig. emphasis).

Importantly, Lefebvre went on to say that ‘the living body’ would be ‘at once subject and object’ (1991: 407). Given his notion of dialectical materialism, it is not surprising that he sought to go beyond the rather clear-cut division between the active and generative body, on the one hand, and the body as acted upon, as constructed by outside forces, on the other: ‘there is neither separation nor an abyss between so-called material bodies, living bodies, social bodies and representations, ideologies, traditions, projects and utopias’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 43). Lefebvre’s reflections on the role of the body were therefore deeply related to his life-long concern with the subordination and the promises of everyday life. Drawing upon other thinkers, most prominently Heidegger (like him, Lefebvre referred to Hölderlin’s notion of ‘poetic dwelling’, see Lefebvre, 1991: 314) and Nietzsche, he related the emphasis on the body to the desired surpassing of the more orthodox Marxian analysis of social practice. In spatial terms,

Besides being inspired by Nietzsche’s Dionysian celebration of existence, as these words indicate, but far from a post-structuralist mode of thought, as it is sometimes argued (e.g. Taylor and Spicer, 2007: 341), Lefebvre saw himself on clear ontological and phenomenological grounds, departing from the notion of ‘a practical and fleshy body conceived of as a totality complete with spatial qualities … and energetic properties’ (1991: 61)—an image that relates back to the Marxist assumption of the ‘total man’ (Lefebvre, 1968: 136 ff.). Moreover, the body’s everyday life, so to speak, ‘the cryptic opacity that is the great secret of the body’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 203) was again positioned as the third, this time resorting to a vocabulary of time: ‘For the body indeed unites the cyclical and the linear, combining the cycles of time, need and desire with the linearities of gesture, perambulation, prehension and the manipulation of things—the handling of both material and abstract tools. The body subsists precisely at the level of the reciprocal movement between these two realms; their difference—which is lived, not thought—is its habitat’ (p. 203). In Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre would further develop this notion by conceptualizing the body as polyrhythmic, as composed of diverse rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004); and making space of multiple rhythms would resurface as one of the propositions in the proposal for the Belgrade architectural competition (Renaudie et al., 2009).

For Lefebvre, then, space invariably was a product of the human body: ‘The whole of (social) space proceeds from the body, even though it so metamorphoses the body that it may forget it altogether’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 405). His interrogation of the complex relationship between human body and space circled around the history of the shift from the space of the body to the body-in-space: how a living organism is produced in space and simultaneously helps produce that space (p. 195 ff.). In other words, the production of space is an embodied process; the body is always already involved in the making of space. In terms of the spatial triad, the body can be understood ‘as a mediator of the relationship between the different [spatial] dimensions’ (Simonsen, 2005: 7) that never occur in isolation. As conceived “dressage,” the body is worked upon and constructed in specific manners through representations of space (Lefebvre, 2004: 38 ff.). At the same time, it is a precondition for perceived space and the carrying-out of spatial practices that require the use of, for example, hands and sensory organs; and it is a source of excessive energies, a producer of difference that allows for other expressions and imaginations, other spatial representations (lived space).

With regard to spatio-organizational analysis, this amounts to the call for a focus on the corporeal production of space (Simonsen, 2005). If the making of spaces of organizing is to be explored through the simultaneity of perceived, conceived and lived spaces, then the body as “polyrhythmic” mediator of these processes becomes an erstwhile “research object.” At no moment, to paraphrase Lefebvre (2004: 67), should the analysis of organizational space lose sight of the body. Studying the sheer embodiment of spatial organization (Dale, 2005; Tyler and Cohen, 2010; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2015) therefore helps redress the diagnosis of a ‘disembodied organizational analysis’, which would treat the body as ‘an absent presence’ (Hassard, Holliday, and Willmott, 2000: 4–5). Moreover, and to all appearances rather challenging to the disembodied gaze of the organizational scholar, all of this pertains to the researcher’s body, too (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012). For Lefebvre, after all, theorizing had a strong sensual dimension; it was entangled with everyday life and fuelled by political passion. Therefore, ‘[t]he ear, the eyes and the gaze and the hands are in no way passive instruments that merely register and record’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 83); he/she ‘changes that which he[/she] observes: he[/she] sets it in motion, he[/she] recognises its power’ (p. 25). As concerns the conditions and the state of scholarship, these claims would warrant a more expansive discussion. In Merrifield’s words (2006: 120), ‘a universal capitulation to the conceived over the lived hasn’t just taken place in the world: it has taken place in those who should know better, in those who read Lefebvre’s work, in those who edit and contribute to radical journals’.

A Hermeneutics of Spacing and the Right to the City

My attempt to enrich the study of organizational space through a more wide-ranging reading into Lefebvre’s oeuvre has led to the discussion of three central tenets informing his work and, ultimately, his work on space: the reformulation of dialectical materialism, his life-long research into the enigma of everyday life, and the critique of the neglect of the body in western philosophy. While this chapter has stuck to the spatialities of organizing, the reception of Lefebvre should by no means be limited to (the production of) space. Yet these tenets do have significant reverberations for organizational spatial enquiries. Going beyond yet encompassing the triad of conceived, perceived and lived space, they point to a ‘hermeneutics of spacing’:

First, accounting for the processes of spatial dialectics. Lefebvre’s non-teleological version of dialectic materialism emphasizes the contradictory dynamics of its three terms, which harbours the ever openness of political possibilities. This kind of politics is thus predicated on the processual, heterogeneous and contested nature of space production. The analytical distinction between conceived, perceived and lived space originated from Lefebvre’s dialectical thinking; the three elements of the triad thus need to be understood as interrelated and in tension. It follows that none of the elements in the spatial triad can be taken on its own as representing an empirical organizational space. Rather than being held as distinct spatial categories (perceived, conceived and lived spaces as different organizational spaces within clearly demarcated organizations), the three terms of Lefebvre’s spatial dialectics afford a processual view on the production of spatial organization. In this sense, it is appropriate to see the triad as consisting of conceived, perceived and lived spacings (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012).

Second, attending to everyday life. Lefebvre dialecticized the quotidian the same way he dialecticized the production of space. Rhythms and ruptures, repetitions and novelties, the mundane and its ‘irreducible remainders’, they reside side by side in everyday life. In tracing the simultaneous and contradictory togetherness of conceived, perceived and lived spacing(s), one is inevitably enmeshed within everyday life. The question of organization therefore becomes one of the myriad and prosaic forms and processes of organizing and reorganizing the social, most notably as they take place in the urban everyday.

Third, appreciating the body. As Tyler and Cohen (2010: 181) pointed out with regard to the performance of gendered organizational spaces, ‘social space … comes into being by being inhabitated’. For Lefebvre the understanding of space began with the body. Space was treated ‘as a product of the human body, … not simply as the physical imposition of a concept, or a space, upon the body’ (Stewart, 1995: 610; orig. emphasis). It is through the pre-linguistic knowledge of our bodies that the world comes to be registered in our perceptions; it is through spatial forces that bodies or a conception of bodies are constructed in a certain manner (Martin, 2002); and it is through corporeal enactments that organizational space can be transformed. The relation between the production of organizational spaces and bodies is thus a mutually constitutive one—and not a causal or representational one (Grosz, 1998). For organizational scholarship, this would mean to include but also go beyond the question of how architecture ‘distributes bodies in a certain space and organizes the flow of communication’ (Kornberger and Clegg, 2004: 1100). Conversely, relating embodiment to the category of lived space (Dale, 2005; Tyler and Cohen, 2010) risks falling short of the embodied dialectical interplay of spacings. If the Lefebvrian body is a mediator of spacings—‘polyrhythmic’, as Lefebvre called it—then the embodiment of space implies the presence of the conceived and the perceived, too.

What I end up with, then, is a perspective that is able to take into account more than ‘just’ organizational space and power struggles in formal organizations—or, more precisely, that offers a thinking of space which cannot be disentangled from the everyday organizing of the social, its embodied complexities and rhythms. All of this does not exclude the mundane spaces within formal organizations. However, the formal organizations of late capitalism and state bureaucracies are already part of the “conceived” abstraction that Lefebvre never tired of arguing against. Autogestion emerges in contradiction to the state (Lefebvre, 2009d). In this sense, a Lefebvrian study of organizing and of spatial organization would be attuned to alternative and temporary spaces of organization and their politics.

In this spirit, I conclude by returning to the proposal for the urban design competition with which this chapter began. The proposal relates the notion of the right to the city—originally formulated in 1967—to the question of organization. Similar to the question of work, which Lefebvre translated from its narrow understanding of (in his time) industrial labour to the manifold and embodied activities of producing and reproducing the urban everyday, the problematic of organization shifts to the city as organizational unit and its processes of organizing. How can a city be organized? Yet as David Harvey points out, ‘the right to the city does not arise primarily out of various intellectual fascination and fads… . It primarily rises up from the streets, from the neighborhoods, as a cry for help and sustenance by oppressed peoples in desperate times’ (Harvey, 2013: xiii). It is again connected to the promise of, and continuous struggle around, autogestion—emancipatory ‘management associations’, in Lefebvre’s words, that ‘appear in the weak points of existing society’ (Lefebvre, 2009d: 144; orig. emphasis). In other words, the right to the city poses the question of organization neither in terms of bureaucratic governmentality nor according to the more recent and proliferating discourse on competitive urban entrepreneurialism (Beyes, 2012). Rather, it reactualizes issues of autogestion and self-organization. As ‘a right to urban life’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 138; orig. emphasis), and thus to fully participate in urban society through everyday practices, it is not granted but to be defined and redefined through quotidian social relations and political actions; it as a right only inasmuch as it is appropriated. As such, it has recently become one of the key watchwords for urban protest and social struggle, picked up and appropriated by a heterogeneous set of initiatives at least in the Western world ‘that invoke the concept and try to use it to form alliances across towns and across issues, between housing activists and artists, leftist groups and cultural workers, small business owners and the new precarious groups’ (Mayer, 2010: 34).

Such appropriations of Lefebvre’s work point to openings for critical and politicized engagements with processes of organization. These processes affect, and are affected by, the colonization and irreducible remainders of everyday life, struggles around embodiment and sexuality, urban and antiglobalization movements as well as questions of citizenship and the right to the city. Whereas Lefebvre’s hopes for a different organization of the social was formed in Fordist and Eurocentric times of postwar urbanism and dwelling as well as workers’ movements and self-organization, his work offers ample inspiration to explore contemporary, emancipatory forms and processes of organizing.